Gambian Wolof (EC)

A Few Things About Gambian Wolof Phonetics

As I get into the new Introduction to Linguistics course here at UW-Madison, I’ve learned more about phonetics! This post will be a very basic introduction to what phonetics is, and how knowing about them can impact specific parts of language learning, like pronunciation. As the semester continues I hope to track how learning about linguistics pairs with learning Gambian Wolof.
Dictionary.com defines phonetics as – the science or study of speech sounds and their production, transmission, and reception, and their analysis, classification, and transcription.

My introductions course describes it further as:

Phonetics – the scientific study of the inventory and structure of the sounds of human language.

  • Articulatory phonetics – physiological mechanisms of speech production (how humans make sounds)
  • Acoustic phonetics – physical properties of sound waves produced in speech
  • Auditory phonetics – perception of sound, including what happens in the ear, auditory nerve, and brain during speech perception
This week I found a new resource:
Ida C Ward, A Short Phonetic Study of Wolof (Jolof). As Spoken in the Gambia and in Senegal (1939)

In these charts Ward breaks down the IPA (international Phonetic Alphabet) symbols for the vowels and consonants found in Gambian Wolof. The IPA uses symbols to represent the sounds of human speech in all languages. The top chart shows how each word should be pronounced, as well as its translation. This source was also helpful because it clearly distinguished between Gambian Wolof and Senegalese Wolof. The consonant chart is explanatory in a different way, placing the consonants into the areas that correspond with the movement of your mouth that occurs when you make the sound. For example f is labiodental, meaning the sound is created when your top teeth are pressed down on your bottom lip. This sound is also fricative, meaning articulators are very close together producing high degree of stricture, but airflow is not stopped. Articulators are parts of the mouth and vocal tract (lips, teeth, tongue, alveolar ridge, uvular, etc) can be positioned to create different sounds. 

Quotography Hub - Topic :- Place of Articulation.... | FacebookI also went through a resource I used last semester, at a time when I paid little attention to these sections. It was very satisfying to be able to go back to these charts and have a better understanding of what information they are passing. 

David P Gamble, Elementary Gambian Wolof Grammar (1991)

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